Yaji

In the Hausa Muslim community of Kumasi, Ghana, where I grew up, in the seventies, yaji was considered the king of all spice mixtures. All yajis contain the following basic ingredients: black, red, and white peppercorns, dried ginger, cloves, dried red peppers, and salt. These are mixed together in a large wooden mortar and pounded with a pestle until floury. Optional ingredients include peanuts and dried garlic. Some yaji makers even add beef bouillon for an enhanced, albeit contemporary, savory effect.

In my house, we had two kinds of yaji. The container for our regular yaji (to which my mother added the foul-smelling but heavenly-tasting locust beans traditionally used in soups in West Africa) sat on a pantry shelf, where my mother could easily find it and sprinkle a tablespoonful into the pot of whatever soup or stew she was making. But some secrecy surrounded the other yaji, which was kept under lock and key in a glass cupboard in our living room. Mother would add a teaspoonful or two of this yaji to anything that Father ate: soup, rice, steak, stew, salad, even taliya, the local handcrafted pasta. Once, when I was nine, I asked my mother why she never gave that yaji to me or my siblings. With a finger to her pursed lips, she replied, “That is for your father only! And don’t even think about opening that jar, you hear me?” Her eyes darted to the cupboard, as if to insure that the orange Ovaltine jar in which she kept the prized condiment was still secure in its enclosure.

When I turned eleven, one of my many uncles began sending me to Douala Cameroon’s, the best suya joint in the city, to buy him his favorite snack—a thinly sliced and skewered beef delicacy that is ubiquitous on West African roadsides at night. Out of the blue, during one such errand, Douala asked me, “What yaji does your uncle want? The one for men with three wives or the one for men with two wives?” By the time I’d gathered enough wits to say that my uncle had only one wife, a fact well known to Douala, the warm, wrapped meat, heavily doused with some kind of yaji, was in my palms.

Not until late in my teen-age years, after my mother died, did my paternal grandmother yield to my questions and reveal the name of the secret ingredient that my mother had added to my father’s yaji. It was masoro, known in English as false cubeb pepper or bush pepper. Its black berries look like peppercorns but are slightly larger and mostly hollow. It has a bittersweet taste and a pungent aroma that is both camphoraceous and spicy. The berries, though used primarily in soups, also have medicinal purposes: an ointment extracted from the whole cubeb fruit is used as an external stimulating agent, and the seeds are said to promote appetite and assist digestion.

It has long been established in almost every tropical region of the world that hot peppers stimulate our appetite and our senses. They also raise body temperature and affect blood circulation. Whenever West African men gather, incredible stories of yaji-inspired sexual stamina abound, and I have one of my own. In the early nineties, a white college friend who had heard me extoll the aphrodisiac qualities of yaji begged me for some when his girlfriend was visiting him one weekend. I gave him a few spoonfuls and cautioned him to use them sparingly. In the dining hall the next day, he dragged me into a rest room. With impish glee, he pulled up his T-shirt to reveal his back, where zigzagged finger scratches were still swollen and bloody.

In our Brooklyn apartment, my wife and I have two yajis, kept in two separate containers, just as my mother used to. In the green-lidded Tupperware container atop the refrigerator is the innocent, child-friendly yaji, whose ingredients were handpicked and pestled by my mother-in-law; she started sending us shipments of her yaji after my two daughters, now ten and seven, got hooked on a stash she brought with her on a visit a few years ago. The other yaji, a special mixture concocted by the suya seller in front of my hotel when I was teaching in Nigeria last year, is simply one of the best I have tasted. It has the aroma of a dozen different spices, with a long-lasting, titillating taste that makes you lick your lips in search of leftover particles.

I consider it a good thing that the Nigerian yaji maker did not inquire about the number of wives I had, though this also implies that the yaji he made could be right for a man anywhere on the spectrum from no wife to four wives, the maximum that Islamic Sharia allows. It is because of this uncertainty that we keep it in a red-topped container in a high cabinet, out of reach of the children. When my older daughter, perturbed by this, recently asked me, “How come only you and Mommy get to eat that yaji ?,” my response to her was pretty much the same as my mother’s more than three decades ago: “That is for Mommy and me only! Don’t even think about opening that Tupperware, you hear me?” ♦

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is the author of “The Prophet of Zongo Street,” a collection of short stories. He teaches undergraduate fiction at N.Y.U.’s Creative Writing Program.